The sport of basketball has been known and popular for many years. Various embodiments of the game have been developed using different numbers of players. Similarly, elastic surfaces or trampolines have been a source of entertainment for over 70 years. Among the joys of playing basketball is the ability to dribble, jump high and dunk or slam a ball into the basket. The recently developed game of SLAMBALL™ combines many of these skills.
Basketball and SLAMBALL™ have captured the interest of spectators and players of varying levels of skill, from beginner to competitive professionals. Any person desiring to develop the skills required of either game may have a difficult time doing so alone. Finding an available court is sometimes challenging for basketball players, but it is especially challenging for SLAMBALL™ players, who must find a court having a combination of rigid and elastic surfaces that will accommodate practice, training and/or play. Players improve through repeated practice and by receiving instruction from others more knowledgeable than themselves, and in particular by receiving feedback regarding their own performance through criticism and/or objective measurements.
Ball game players often find that they do not receive sufficient shooting or slamming practice during normal team practices. Thus, there is a continuing need for persons desiring to improve their skills to practice independently and in a time-efficient manner, where a great deal of time is not lost chasing after loose balls rather than shooting or slamming. Several types of basketball retrieval apparatuses that automatically return a ball to a player are known in the art, but none address the court availability or performance improvement quantification problems, i.e. they do not address the need to objectively measure performance during either a practice session or an actual game. There are player skill parameters, referred to herein as “metrics”, for which traditional means for measuring performance (e.g., a stopwatch) are insufficient. In the games of basketball and SLAMBALL™, these include measures of the vertical heights from a playing surface that a player attains, as well as statistics related to successful and unsuccessful slam-dunks. Means for quantifying such skills in the context of a practice session or an actual game would be highly desirable.
There is also a need for those players desiring training and instruction to receive it in a cost-efficient manner. A system allowing either individualized or group on-court instruction would be highly advantageous.